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Legitimizing Violence at the European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations at Sea and the Vulnerable Other

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Legitimizing Violence at the European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations at Sea and the Vulnerable Other City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2020 Legitimizing Violence at the European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations at Sea and the Vulnerable Other Michela Demelas The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3960 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] LEGITIMIZING VIOLENCE AT THE EUROPEAN BORDER: GENDERED MISREPRESENTATIONS AT SEA AND THE VULNERABLE OTHER by MICHELA DEMELAS A Master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York 2020 © 2020 MICHELA DEMELAS All Rights Reserved ii Legitimizing Violence at the European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations at Sea and the Vulnerable Other by Michela Demelas This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts. ________________ __________________________ Date Dána-Ain Davis Thesis Advisor ________________ __________________________ Date Dána-Ain Davis Executive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Legitimizing Violence at the European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations at Sea and the Vulnerable Other by Michela Demelas Advisor: Dana Davis This thesis highlights a temporal and spatial gap in the feminist literature about migrants' journeys throughout the Mediterranean, and investigates the gendered dynamics acting upon the encounter between the European border and racialized bodies at sea. The Mediterranean sea’s material features allow Europe to approach migration as a humanitarian crisis coming from outside, which discharges its responsibility for the deaths. Yet, essentialistic views represent the feminized Other as vulnerable and needing to be saved from the male Other and the sea. Such views shape the Western narratives around concrete rescue procedures and border authorities behaviors. The encounter between the border and racialized bodies legitimizes, therefore, the perpetuation of the border's masculine enforcement. It guarantees the integrity of the European subject’s identity as a warrior against the savage man and a good savior of the vulnerable, both epistemologically and materially. I identify this gap to open a new horizon of possibilities to challenge the European masculine violence at the border. I suggest that further investigation should begin from an epistemological criticism to gendered mainstream narratives about migrants at sea. Visibilizing women's stories in the Mediterranean could bring to a new awareness about the dangers they face. In reality, gendered dangers for women at sea are connected to the structural injustice of the border that is epistemologically hidden behind the sea by the state. Thus, moving the focus to the sea could begin to dismantle the deadly wall in which Europe has transformed the sea. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. THE BORDER THROUGH GENDERED AND RACIALIZED BODIES: THE ROOT OF THE SUBJECT’S IDENTITY 10 2.1 Migration as a Crisis 17 3. THE NATURALIZATION OF GENDERED VIOLENCE BEHIND THE SEA 21 3.1 The Uncontrollability of the Border and its Mobility 24 3.2 The Solid Sea 30 3.3 The Monolithic Woman at the Border at Sea 35 3.4 Producing Gendered Vulnerability at Sea 43 4. CONCLUSION 53 BIBLIOGRAPHY 59 v SECTION 1 INTRODUCTION1 As the morning ferry from Piraeus approaches, Lesvos emerges receptive and tranquil from the crystalline Aegean waters. (Tsoni, 2016, p. 36) In 2019, Giorgia Linardi2 was invited by L’Assedio, an Italian television broadcast, to talk about her work at sea. On that occasion, she decided to show the audience a picture of a woman’s dead body floating in the water. “The Mediterranean sea is this” (L’Assedio, 2019, 1:08), she says, “we need to understand what is happening” (0:27). Besides the questionability of the act of instrumentalizing this woman’s picture,3 it is interesting to reflect on Linardi’s choice of showing a woman, and not a man, to represent the Mediterranean sea as the violence of European border and provoke people’s reaction. Forgotten and killed by the catastrophe4 at sea; women5 have been massively crossing the Mediterranean on partially deflated, low-quality, rickety boats in very unsafe conditions. Yet, along with the epistemological construction of the alleged6 refugee crisis happening for European countries, the public debate about people arriving in Europe by boat has turned out to be a gendered misrepresentation. Among the false myths in the common imaginary about migrants at sea, the fact that boats are typically imagined as full of young and able men 1 Sporadic translations to English have been made by the author. 2 Giorgia Linardi is an Italian jurist working in the context of human rights, conflict, and migration. She is the current Legal Adviser and Mission Coordinator for External Relations of the Sea Watch (SW), a German NGO that rescues migrants in the Mediterranean sea. 3 Linardi herself says: “Honestly, I feel like I am being disrespectful” (L’Assedio, 2019, 0:25) for instrumentalizing the picture of the woman to provoke the audience’s reaction and raising awareness about the migrants’ cause. 4 I am using catastrophe as Roberto Barrios (2017) defines it. According to him, the term is used “to convey the nonanthropological understanding of disaster as an isolated event that begins with the manifestation of a hazard, that cannot be prevented, and that occurs as an anomaly unrelated to the quotidian order of things” (p. 155). 5 I voluntarily decided not to use the labels of refugee and asylum-seeker except for the cases in which I quote an author that uses them or I refer to the framework of the refugee crisis as Europe has elaborated it. I use instead the words people, women, men, children, older people. I also use racialized bodies to indicate how people are perceived by the body politic, arrivals to refer to landings, migrants to highlight that people are on the move, and passengers to talk about people onboard boats. 6 I use “alleged” because, as I argue later, the term crisis has been used by institutions and the public discourses to refer to the increasing numbers of arrivals in the European continent as a functional epistemological framework. 1 (Binkowski, 2016) has helped nationalist narratives depicting migrants as strong warriors fearlessly navigating the lethal obstacle of the sea and coming through its uncontrollable waves to invade the body politic’s territory. These narratives long provided justifications for the state’s masculine approach to migrants’ subjugation and national security and, consequently, a process of border genderization. Along with the masculinization of border enforcement procedures aimed at Europe’s protection, the state impersonates the male warrior fighting against the bad man to protect his nation7 (I. Young, 2003) but remains good and compassionate toward the helpless (Ahmed, 2015). Migrant women enter therefore hegemonic narratives as the vulnerable Other waiting to be saved from their men (Spivak, 2988) and, I argue, the hardship of the sea. Once they are in the liminal moment/place of the border at sea, racialized bodies enter into the bareness of life (Butler, 2003) and their identities get unmade and re-made in the indefiniteness of the waves. “She is a gorgeous woman, floating in the water [...]. But we will never know what her name was, where she was from, why she was there” (0:50) Linardi says. During my experience as a land emergency response volunteer in Lesvos,8 I observed how my relationship with the sea was changing. I grew up on an Italian island and spent my whole childhood surrounded by it. My memories are soaked with salty water, which has long been a symbol of liberation and relief for my soul. My time in Lesvos has changed something. After spending years of my life away from it, I had come back to the same water I had seen as a 7 Women do not have any subjectivity inside the subject’s community, which is why I refer to the state, the body politic, and the Western subject as masculine. According to Iris M. Young (2003), when the household is threatened “there cannot be divided wills” (p. 4) and “the woman concedes critical distance from decision-making autonomy” (p. 4). The extent to which the masculine leader approaches politics through a gendered lens effectively legitimizes him to create a muscular security state towards the outside but also expects unity of purposes inside. 8 Lesvos is a Greek island located in the Aegean Sea. Its shores are only a few kilometers far from the Turkish shore, which is why most migrants trying to reach Europe from Turkey transit from there. In Lesvos, I volunteered twice in the emergency response team of Lighthouse Relief (LHR), an NGO based in the North shore of the island, assisting people crossing the sea by spotting the boats and helping them as they land. 2 sweet floating nest where I could hide from the chaotic rhythm of the capitalistic and progressive society. But there, in the midst of waves, I found extreme danger, despair, and injustice instead. On the North shore of Lesvos, while watching the horizon with our binoculars to identify potential boats of migrants looking for help, my fellow volunteers and I could daily see numerous ferries, cargoes, pleasure boats, and fishing boats. These vessels safely sail through the narrow strait of sea dividing the Greek island from Turkey.
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